


Balanced

by Flowerflamestars



Category: The Grisha Trilogy - Leigh Bardugo
Genre: Alina doesn't particularly care for being fake dead, F/M, No one dead AU, Power Swap, the war ended the same
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-08
Updated: 2019-11-29
Packaged: 2020-11-27 18:40:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,168
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20953097
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Flowerflamestars/pseuds/Flowerflamestars
Summary: She’d been raised a soldier, and a soldier she was.She was thinking, Grisha, Queen, Summoner. No single action can truly stop a great war- where was Ravka now? Bankrupt, with a young impoverished king, no single summoner strong enough left to lead the Second Army.Alina was thinking, I didn’t bleed for this.





	1. Chapter 1

She saw the shadows first the morning of her wedding.

Not even a veil for her hair or a ring for her hand, a paupers wedding for a girl who’d run away from fate. The priest they spoke to before the ceremony was charmed- how could he not be? The evil defeated, the country rejoicing, two poor orphans before him asking only to marry in his church.

Alina saw it in his kind brown eyes- the thought that this was a happy ending, a tale drawing to a close.

A girl and a boy, wed on the day of a war ending.

But she hadn’t been a girl for a very long time.

It was like water rushing in her ears- Mal’s voice, steady and sure, drowned out by cool waves. The priest patting her numb hand before turning back to the doorway of his church, voice low in some response she couldn’t parse.

Mal was turning to face her, eyes happy and she- she couldn’t look at him. Didn’t see the oldest friend she’d known brought back to life, didn’t see the fraught childhood she’d clung to through him. All Alina could see was the times, over and over, those eyes had dismissed her.

Not pretty enough when they were grown to be more than a friend, not interesting enough until she tried to die to save him and ended up Grisha- not worth chasing until she was so far gone.

And then what? Mal had never wanted the Sun Summoner, he’d wanted the quiet girl who’d loved him like taking a knife to her own chest, again and again. He’d never noticed the blood until someone else’s hands staunched the wound.

Alina thought of the love and sacrifice that had raged in her heart- Mal, her oldest friend and the last key to her power, the Darkling, her one equal and the desperate cost of peace.

And all at once, Alina knew that if she married Mal, if she returned to that forgotten valley that had birthed them, she’d never leave again. She’d die there, sooner or later, as forgotten as it’s long history. Alina Sarkov, who’d turned the tide of war, who’d sacrificed the only person who might understand her completely to end it.

It wasn’t water rushing in her ears, it was her heartbeat, thudding in unforgiving rhythm.

The smile had frozen on Mal’s face, and he reached for her. Calloused fingertips brushed her arm before Alina jerked back, hissing before she could stop herself, “Don’t touch me.”

Her voice sounded wrong, higher pitched, hysterical.

But Alina didn’t become hysterical. She’d been raised a soldier, and a soldier she was. Instead she was thinking, Grisha, Queen, Summoner. No single action can truly stop a great war- where was Ravka now? Bankrupt, with a young impoverished king, no single summoner strong enough left to lead the Second Army.

Alina was thinking, I didn’t bleed for this.

Mal, because he was very Mal, even now, followed the step back she’d taken. Both his hands were raised- like a heart render ready to strike, but any magic he might have once possessed was gone- his hands were raised to brush down her arms, to try to hold her close.

Alina was thinking, peace and death are different things.

Her raging heart swelled to beat like the dances in the Little Palace, like the power of the cut singing in her veins, like the rhythm Aleksandr set, magic to delight the Lanstov royals.

And from the corner of her eye, she saw the ripple. Along with the pounding in her ears, the shadow danced and grew. Seeped from the natural dark cast by pews in this dim, ancient church, sliding over the stone like so much water, to drown her fear.

Alina’s gasp was as broken as her voice had been, but finally, finally, she could breathe again.

“Aleksandr?” It was a whisper, the impulse as close as raising her hands in the cut, to drawing a gun from her back.

Mal stopped moving forward, brow furrowed in familiar confusion more than anger. Because he didn’t even know- couldn’t have told anyone the name of the Grisha he’d hated so much, that he would have died to kill.

That, now that she looked at it, he had died to kill. Alina had just been the tool he used to kill a monster, with the extra benefit of freeing her from what he’d only ever seen as a burden.

Her power.

She met his brown eyes dead on, finally furious, the feeling enough to wash away the empty cold of watching the Darkling burn. Watching them burn her too- for her protection. Neither peace nor death, but erased. They’d left a saint in the place where a woman still lived and breathed. As far as the world was concerned, there was no Alina Sarkov: there'd only ever been the Sun Summoner, now cold ash on a colder morning.

“Alina,” Mal murmured, moving closer to her again, hand smoothing her hair. “It’s alright.”

Like she were a horse he needed to calm.

It was alright, because as Alina clenched her fists, ready to snap back, to keen and rage at the world, at her mistakes, and this man- the shadows moved with her.

What had Baghra told her? Once upon a time, there’d been an ambitious, brilliant boy with a power the world feared. Hunted. Countless lives and countless deaths, he’d been waiting for an equal. Along the way, mistakes and arrogance made the Fold- a living thing, so much made of him as he was of Baghra. And with the Fold, he would would be unstoppable.

Once upon a time, a girl who belonged to no one was born too late. They called her a saint and she shone like one for them, but only a man who was made of shadow understood her. Too late, they’d broken the world between them of instead of balancing it, and the girl took away the darkness.

And so lost the light.

But where did the darkness go?

Alina raised her palms, and felt for what lived in her heart. Not the sun, but the night- and shadow rose. Warm and endless black, darkness brushed her skin like the touch of a lover.

Even a broken world must have balance. The Fold had been part of the Darklings power, and she’d taken it for herself. Alina swallowed the night to save the world, gave away her light for desperate peace, and in it’s place become something new.

Shadow rose and rose, billowing until there was nothing but endless night. Out the church windows, through the doors, burying from view and mind and possibility, her almost husband. Glass broke, the world shook, but all Alina felt was warm. A thousand years in this giving, wanting dark, no wonder hunger had made him mad. The light had been generous too- but it was the dark that yearned. 

Alina tipped back her head and laughed, tears in her eyes.

—

Far away, new skin and old light rose from cold ash, and began to burn anew.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Worn smooth and warm even now, Aleksander’s fingertips connected with what he’d been looking for. 
> 
> Dreading. 
> 
> Bright in the moonlight, even in clinging grey ash, Alina’s collar of bone shone. 
> 
> Clever queen, my young ageless grace, what have you done?

They found him first.

A new light rising in the east, a second sun shining from the bare skin of an ask-streaked boy no now knew. He’d encouraged that, hadn’t he? A hundred names, the carefully hidden longevity of a powerful Grisha.  


So very few people in his long life had wanted to hold Aleksandr’s eyes.  


It didn’t feel like waking up- it felt like burning. He imagined that was what they’d done to the body; he was covered in it, silt-fine ash from the touch of an inferni, thick in his throat. He’d never actually been burned before- only threatened with it- and this could not have been a witches pyre.  


But much like that old threat, that long buried life when he’d been the Black Heretic, it was the first in a long time he woke with company.   


Any real awareness didn’t trickle in until voices had reached him.  


There was no light, no darkness either. Burning- alive and alight with something more than fire- Aleksandr knew it’s touch. Making, binding. Small sciences were teachable, just elements. This  was more than simple pieces: singularity that lived in bones and blood. Special, impossibly rare bones and blood.

Too fast for a death, too quick for a rebirth._ Amplified_.   


He’d known Alina learned its name.  


The voices were raggedly tired, Ravkan and Shu alike. Peasant’s syllables that smoothed the edges from words he’d helped coin- not scared, but loud. Awed.   


“_Sol Koroleva_”-  


“Look at him-_ the light reborn_”-  


“_Our Saints return in mysterious ways”_-  


Light. That was all he saw when the Darkling opened his eyes to the morning after the war had ended. A blindness that was slow to fade, blinking fresh eyelids over a gaze that he’d learn was the coal and gold he’d always carried.   


The silvered hair was new however, and convenient.  


Equally so, and more_ wrenching_, the Sun Summoners light spilling from his newborn skin like the tide.   


_Alina- Alina what did you do-  
_

_Merzost- _colder than ice, hotter than fire. That which should not be meddled in.

It was what made his bones, a price that must always be balanced.He’d waited for it always, that cost. An equal. A Grisha Queen; one who was like him, where there’d never be another. The one essential fact of the power that made them: like calls to like.   


This burn wasn’t healing; the Darkling hadn’t been killed, only his own strength brought him back. Not this, never this. Nothing could kill her- so why, _why_\- Alina would never have bound his bones, Aleksandr couldn’t have come back if she had.  


He remembered those last moments of pain and folly and blood. She’d neither taken him, or gifted him this.  


_Where was Alina?  
—_

They named him Sergei, for a local saint who’d saved all manner of innocents from a forest fire. A smoke tinged name for an ash born boy- the holy name of a newborn saint.   


Aleksandr let it settle over him, blinked its simplicity into life. Asking questions wouldn’t help- they wanted a blank slate, he’d give them one to spill onto all that they knew.  


A shaky handed priest baptized him, a first for the Darkling. Gave him the Apparat’s false blessings, spoke of peace and hope. After water came oil and incense, spread on his forehead, on the backs of his faintly glowing hands by nuns.   


A hundred peasants prayed over the sun in his veins.  


He couldn’t _control_ it- the dark hungered, yearned- Aleksander was used to shadowed claws and teeth that felt like strength. The light_ reached_; just as invincible, burning, seeking the dark corners to fill.   


Balance.  


Seven mind numbing hours of concentration before he could see his own fresh-formed hands, until he could step into the cold dark in borrowed peasants clothing and walk their muddy foot trails back to the pyre.  


Aleksander had timed it correctly- with the setting sun this quiet pastoral place turned its eyes inward to food and comfort. The square was empty.   


Two piles of shining ash; an inferni of only moderate skill, Aleksander knew, shifting through the glimmering mess. A member of even the third legion of the Second Army would have been good enough to leave nothing behind. He logged and discarded the possibility of seeking out the untrained Grisha living here on what had been the edge of the Fold.  


Two piles meant two bodies.  


The beat of his heart told him Alina was _somewhere. _Merzost and the might of her light in his soul- they wouldn’t burn a royal with elemental fire. If one of the Grisha battalion leaders had fallen this would have been their fate.  


But then, why make them a martyr with the dark?  


Worn smooth and warm even now, Aleksander’s fingertips connected with what he’d been looking for. _Dreading_.  


Bright in the moonlight, even in clinging grey ash, Alina’s collar of bone shone.  


_Clever queen, my young ageless grace, what have you done?_

_—_  
In the morning, the story would spread.  


One village, on the edge of the forest, on the edge of the dark, where a saint had died and a heretic had fallen. They didn’t whisper- they cried out, spun it with the songs and tales that traveled down their well worn road, all the way to the royal capital.  


A boy- a young man- born grown with eyes of coal and hair like the sun, who rose whole and perfect from the ashes of their saint. Sol Koroleva, the sun who must always rise.   


A new dawn, they called it.   


A new era, they sang.  


_Sergei of the Ash-Wood, Sergei by the sea, the sun that rises so that we could be free_-  


Aleksandr turned his face to the mountains. Let his feet follow the beat of his new heart, like that called like across any world. _Balance, _he’d thought, but he’d overlooked _exchange.  
_


End file.
